'Grief is not a mental illness that should be treated with pills': Doctors hit back at creeping medicalisation of life events

Grief is not a mental illness that should be treated with anti-depressants, experts say.

In an unsigned editorial in the influential medical journal The Lancet, experts argue that grief does not require psychiatrists and that 'legitimising' the treatment of grief with antidepressants 'is not only dangerously simplistic, but also flawed.'

The debate follows a decision by the American Psychiatric Association to classify grief as a mental illness in a bid to allow to doctors to be more flexible about how early patients can be treated for depression after the death of a loved one....more